A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

talent for indolence and ordering memories into dazzling little patterns to please the slightly inflated ego. Surviving as I said.

      Didn’t I?

      4

      Then on a certain day at a certain hour the catastrophe began.

      Not all at once.

      Something slipped.

      It was terrible at the time yet it seemed alone.

      Later they would go on with their lives.

      Unbearable things happen then we go on. To other unbearable things.

      No? You deny this? You mean it is not true?

      It is not true. It is not true. It is not true.

      Autumn. Sooty plastic bags belly like medical gloves decorative sneakers on telephone wire detritus littering the street’s methodical crosses of sky. Tiny yellow leaves scatter like hands at the foot of the ginkgo tree. The light outside the house is heavier the streets cleaner than summer’s. An underlayer of damp skitters up the flank. Just enough to tickle your skin. Hah ah. A hollowing of bottles somewhere up an alley. Where are we going. Somewhere anywhere. Out of this world. A snap in the air wakes you up. At every corner. Snap! On the beach in the field in the street. Snap! And in the wetness there is the smell of burning leaves.

      The dew on the doorknob makes it cold to the touch. There are shouts to stop the bus. Hey! Hey! Its yellow flashing back lumbers to a halt by the bank of mailboxes. One red flag is raised in a cavalier wave.

      But now it is the jam of muff and scarf and parka hood in a diesel-scented 25¢ morning. You demur to the sarcasms of the bus driver hidden behind his charity. You look like a little old man! The smell of diesel and spilled gasoline of tar and whiffs of doughnuts bacon coffee and the scum smell of whisky mash from the river. And underneath the persistent smell of stale bread that dominates the early-morning city. A mush of leaves rotting in the gutter. Filthy pigeons fretting on the sidewalks. The cold fitful angry blurring of the hastening goal-driven crowds.

      It was moving to a climax something that would explode into crystals of hysteria the massive collision the bolt of power the clash with the avatars of a strident unbegun and unending.

      War.

      Pinwheel fireworks at first spinning in a corbelled heaven that aim to blind and blow off the fingers of the rocketers themselves. And every innocent and guilty thing around them. Innocently nevertheless for the only drive was need. Perceived need. Imagined need. Feeling of need. The fluctuating mirror locked in the middle of the iris. Imprisoned everywhere in projections. Of me. Of you. Of him. Where there is no other. What was not given was anything beyond the self something to call a world only trash and a bright commercial try this and go to heaven fail to try this and go to the hell you so richly. The spinning flak on all sides a chaotic baby god gleefully rips its toys apart then tosses the pieces in the air look look glitter glitter chortling at all that panic. When the bullets tear through the skull in the car it stops a smile shocked on its face.

      As he cradles it and sinks into the brightness of its eyes.

      A historical memory. A chapter in an unread book. A website visited with increasing rareness.

      A savage brightness. As if a curtain had been torn open revealing the madness of the day. In the melodramatics of Marxist discourse the superstructure sheered off the base like the peeled face from a clown. Doing his bit for the paying audience eating his dead.

      He turns to the camera inspired by a brilliantly bad pun. Or rather palindrome. (A clown speaking in palindromes!) Babbles on for a moment unheard a prattler of bliss in this darwin morning. Then returns like a jaguar to his feed.

      Unimaginable evil. What is that.

      A hollow in time continuity slackening in a slowly unravelling weave. The texture of events grew quicker as if. So many shearings through a fabric of petroleum and compound interest. Asegai in chips. A cicatrice designed in enamel and disgust but disgust would become passé moral numbness splintered in sarcasms to the east perforated with grins elsewhere the preferred response on the talk shows. But we are anticipating for everyone will have the moral sensitiveness beaten out of him out of her taught the acrobatics of self-interest strategies of suspicion tactics of fear the adroit calibrated hermeneutics of self-aggrandizement. For each their own and grammar be damned. And what better method for this than the display of the horror of man against man. Against woman against woman against man. Enchanting. Informative. Educational. And fun. Switch channels in the rapids of changelessness. Before even the remote was invented whirlpool of cement flecked with body fluid and tissue. This you he I write down in school notebooks in preference to the banalities of his teachers. And achieve many A’s. And think I must be on to something.

      For from that afternoon everything spins away. Of course not that the received wisdom always suspect. Yet another time is inaugurated. He is no longer he but riots of they a heterodox otherness in invasion. Besides his genes the world that squeezes at him through the television is a mobbed shattering signaling like a mirror flashing his eyes to the sun the designs of hysteria inside him. His shout is a hollow wrenching that sounds in small blind acts of self-defeat. Calmly. It is the only power he knows or it recognizes. As it slowly veers toward you. Not to be resisted master mister sir buddy guy or denied.

      (So fold up like a wallet or a fetus. Flick open in random acts of fury like a switch blade. Gash the accommodating hand. Fold back in with a click. Snarl. Shake gently in the corner before pouring. Cultivate indignation. Be determined to live.)

      Euthanasia was impractical at the time so one might as well live.

      Water stains the carpet before the front door.

      An animal moves outside brushing its flank against the walls.

      The house has become permeable or rather static massing for a strike.

      What had always been out there is now out there no longer. The small faces inside the television set are biting into little worlds. The walls are beginning to merge with the air. There were no masks left to fit on our faces our faces were damaged masks. The solitary one is solitary no longer he cannot find solitude he walks the city and finds a crowd of eyes. Home post-father is a brusque gale of facetious malice and electronic nattering. He blares his stereo and wedges himself into the gutter of a book. There seems to be no private world left and it will not leave him alone. Shall not leave you alone. Cannot leave the alone alone.

      Avoidance maneuvres leading toward the cliff.

      Into a finger of the sea.

      Or no. A thumb. Splay from the hand insignia of obstinacy said the fortune teller. Plucking at it clucking when it springs back to its prehensile jut. Mother of tempests. Wilding annihilating gray. Where the fishermen stand with their long nodding rods and pull in fish or just wait. Patient. Hip deep in the gnash of the surf.

      You will not give in. And you will pay.

      So the private linked to the public in a spasm at once absolutely detached and resolutely intimate the eyes gaze like fish in a bowl and the groin thrashes. In loss. Feeding the starved eyes. The absolute impotence of absolute awareness the chains of light that seal you to your chair. As the riptide of your family sucks the sand around you. Threatening the rock where you sit caught between the kaleidoscope of the sun and the corruscations of the sea. Eyes of chaos and chaos. A starfish flicking a prickled arm in a spit cup of foam. In the livingroom. Between the stairs and the antique glass. And the bickering on the upper floors. A silence that throbs constantly like an omen. The whisper of moving sheets.

      There was a plan for order in all this so many aims goals limited purposes over-riding interests etc. Magnanimous or miserly gestures toward organization generally willful and sanctimonious military in style coercive in nature good-hearted loving and tough. Brutal goodness. The point will be to shove him into being. Whether he wants to go or not. It is the right thing to do. At the right time in the right way. There being no other. Only one. Only once. Or you will destroy not yourself